This paper examines whether, and how, the professional ambitions of women and men are valued differently in the marriage market, and how that asymmetry feeds back into labour-market choices. Using only secondary data from verified official statistics and peer-reviewed or formally published research, it combines Indian national datasets — the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023-24, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-21), the Time Use Survey (TUS) 2024 and the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-22 — with the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 and a structured synthesis of nine experimental and quasi-experimental studies from India, the United States, China and a panel of developed countries. The evidence converges on an asymmetric pattern: male earning capacity and ambition raise marriage-market value, while visible female career commitment is frequently discounted. In Indian matrimonial field experiments, women who signal an intention to keep working after marriage receive up to 22 per cent less interest from men, and employed women are 14.5 per cent less likely to receive interest than non-working women. In a U.S. elite MBA programme, single women understated desired pay by about US$18,000 when they believed male peers would see their answers. These ‘marriage-market penalties’ coexist with near-parity in Indian higher education (female GER 28.5 vs. male 28.3) but deep divergence in work (female LFPR 41.7 per cent vs. male 78.8 per cent) and unpaid labour (289 vs. 88 minutes per day). The paper proposes a ‘competing desires’ framework in which women face an anticipatory trade-off between labour-market returns and marriage-market returns that men largely do not, and it identifies conditions — more egalitarian norms, higher female wages, reduced ‘greedy work’ — under which the trade-off weakens. Policy implications for India and directions for future research are discussed.